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Monday, April 29, 2013

Soul Culture sits down with Mississippi rapper Big K.R.I.T for our ongoing #OKNotToBeOK mental health campaign, as he speaks on music as therapy, loneliness, depression and finally making the decision to be happy.

“Music has always been my therapy; from writing records when nobody could hear them to now,”
he says. “You get to a point where you don’t know how to express
yourself. It’s like I don’t have a punching back to beat on and I can’t
just scream in front of everybody…

“So I write down my problems and then I play it back to myself over
and over again and it makes me feel good. That’s really what it is. It’s
like I’m trying to reassure myself that everything's going to be ok.

“As far as depression I think everybody gets down and out about life.
You get to a point where you feel, ‘Is this really what I am supposed
to be doing or does this really make me happy?’ – especially when you
throw yourself in a realm where you can’t really quit. You can’t stop
because you have invested everything into it but it’s about waking up
the next morning and starting all over again.

“Meditation is something I’m starting to figure out a little bit. Getting
a moment of quiet before everything starts up, waking up before
everybody else does – before my phone starts ringing. It’s not easy,
man. Normally when you set a goal for yourself its tunnel vision and you
go months and months working on this one goal. When you get there you
look back and so much has changed. Your family has changed and as far as
your friends whatever they got going on in their life has changed.

“You might leave everything behind. Relationships – you might lose some friends – and all that can be a real shock to you.
When you look around and are like, ‘Damn, I’ve accomplished everything I
wanted but am I really happy? I’m alone with all of this. I don’t
really have anybody to share it with.’ That’s when you have to kind of
sit down and find some happiness inside and take in everything slow.

“I call it the slip slow syndrome. When I eat, I eat
slower now. When I have a drink, I drink slower now and when I’m around
friends I enjoy everything about it because you never know the next day
you on the road. You super busy and you’re like damn! You gotta make
yourself happy.”

“It’s the pursuit of happiness, so that means we’re always chasing it – because it’s just that easy to not be happy.”